Author's Note

I'd like to thank Richard who supported my Ko-fi. At the moment he is the only supporter, but if you like my work and want to see me do more writing like this, then consider supporting me there: https://ko-fi.com/hatterthepony

Chapter 1

Petal Brass was dead, or that’s what anyone would assume upon first seeing him laid out in the undergrowth with a large wound in his side, blood spilling out into the foliage as sightless sky blue eyes stared at the canopy of leaves overhead.

Bandits, or maybe some kind of beast had gotten the better of him and left the poor earth pony for dead in the middle of the Everfree forest. Likely not a beast upon closer inspection of the wound however.

A brown pegasus had stumbled across the corpse of the poor stallion, her eyes were a dull shade of green, and her body looked like she needed a few good meals in her, but she didn’t seem bothered in the slightest to find a corpse in the middle of the forest.

Instead the mare stepped forward slowly and pressed a hoof to the neck of the stallion, giving a soft scoff as she removed the spiked choker that prevented her getting a good feel on their neck.

“It seems fate smiles on you today my friend, you’re only mostly dead.”

The pegasus didn’t explain anything further to the corpse, producing a black book with a yellow eye on the cover from within a set of saddle bags.

A hulking figure slowly moved up behind the pegasus, raising an eyebrow at the corpse. This stallion didn’t seem phased by the corpse either, although considering he was twice the size of it, and his entire body was coated in scars, that was more understandable.

“You sure this won’t overwork you?”
“No, this is going to hurt like hell, so I need you to make sure I don’t swallow my tongue or die,” The pegasus said as she worked on patching up the wound in the earth ponies side, bandages and stitching done with skilful haste “They’ve lost a lot of blood. They might have brain damage.” She commented, mainly for herself as the hulking figure behid her didn’t seem to understand the words in the slightest.

She moved over to the hulking figure and opened up his saddle bags, producing a ceramic pot with a rubber tube coming from the bottom of it. The tube ended in a spike and the area where it came out of the pot seemed to have a bulb of some kind on it. She stabbed the metal spike into the leg of the pony, giving a soft sigh as she passed the pot back to her colossal colleague.

“Hold that up,” She said, squeezing the bulb to create a funnel effect and drain the fluid into the pony. The hulking figure took the pot in one hoof and held it up in the air. His off white fur and the ragged way in which his purple mane was cut might have made him look like some dumb barbarian, but the genuine concern in his eyes for a pony he had not even known betrayed a far deeper understanding of the situation at hand.

As the pegasus flicked through the book, the large stallion known as Lavender the Barbarian spoke,
“Stabbed and left for dead, no signs of struggle. This is not an honorable way to go.” He made a religious motion with his hoof, before the pegasus seemed to find the page she was looking for, placing the book down on the body of the earth pony.

Within the book, there were two circles, big enough for a pony to fit their hooves in, covered in symbols and strange markings drawn in red ink. The mare known as Necrosis planted her hooves in the circles, giving a soft grunt as she begin to speak in a long dead tongue.

The hulking barbarian behind her took a single step backwards. Her tongue sent forth impossible sounds and her lips seemed to move in impossible ways, and for a few seconds, nothing seemed to be happening.

The chanting got faster, and the air around her seemed to grow cold, and then?

Suddenly, she wasn’t stood in the forest anymore, and it felt like a great weight had been lifted off her chest. Tall trees stretched infintely around her, so densely packed that they seemed to form a wall.

The path she had to follow was laid out before her, and she clung tightly onto her book, which seemed to have followed her through to this strange new place.

After taking a moment to steel her resolve, she begin to move forward along clearing that had been left. Leaves crunched under her hooves, and the path seemed to shift in unnatural ways as she made her way along it.

It didn’t take long for her to reach the end, or maybe it did, she couldn’t tell. But, she found what she was looking for. A large torii, (a weird Japonese gateway) stood before her in a clearing, the entrance blocked with a bright red doorway covered in metal lumps.

That was the first thing that grabbed her attention, the second thing was even stranger.

The dead stallion was no longer a corpse, and was instead sat against a tree staring towards the gate, looking somewhat contented with themselves. Necrosis walked over to to them calmly and sat down next to them.

“Hello.” She said.
“Hello.” The stallion respond simply.
“I am terribly sorry to tell you this, but you are dead.”
“I did notice. My friend killed me.”

Necrosis fell silent. She certainly hadn’t been expecting that.
“Your own friend killed you?”
“Yeah, figured it might happen though. So, are you like… My angel or a demon, or something?”
Necrosis shook her head, “Nothing like that, I’m from the living world, and I cam to bring you back. But, if I do, you might have brain damage, and you won’t remember any of this. You will suffer, and it will hurt like hell, you might not even make it. But, you will have a chance, and I will do my best to save you.”

After a few moments, Petal looked towards the gate.
“And if I choose to stay?”
“Then you will have time to come to terms with your life, and your death, before that gate opens and you move beyond… I have no idea what lies beyond the first gate, maybe it’s peace, maybe it’s some kind of afterlife, maybe its just the end… Once you go beyond that gate, even I cannot reach you…”
“Do many people take that option?” Petal asked, looking towards the mare with those dark blue orbs, they were made up of several different shades of blue that formed an intricate and beautiful sight.

“No, normally if they’re at peace, they’ve already gone beyond the first gate and there’s not much I can do. But, the fact you’re here tells me there’s something you aren’t quite content with… Likely the fact that your friend murdered you. Still, I like to see myself as a doctor, and I need to make you aware that it might just lead to incredible suffering and you expiring again…”
Petal shrugged, “Well, let’s get it over with then. Petal can take it.”

Necrosis gave a laugh, holding out her hoof, and when Petal touched it, she flipped open her book once more.

The brown pegasus awoke. Her body was numb, her muscles felt impossibly heavy, and everything hurt. A dry, wheezing wretching sound escaped her lips, before she found herself emptying the contents of her stomach all over the ground.

One would think you’d get used to using magic to tear into the spirit world, but it never got easier. She felt just as shitty as she had every other time she had done it. In fact, this time felt even worse then normal. She wiped her mouth and attempted to stand, but her legs felt like jelly.

To Petal, dying had been like drifting off to sleep. It was a cliché thing to think, but after the initial panic of his wounds, everything had gone numb and tingly, and then his life blood had leaked out to the point his brain shut down and he left his mortal shell behind.

Living again was agony. Necrosis explained that the fluid he had been filled with was meant to stop his body from shutting down again and serve as a temparory replacement for the blood he had lost from his fatal stabbing.

He was alive again, and he would be thankful for it if he lived through this. For the moment agony was ripping through his every nerve ending and he could do nothing but lie in bed and cry to himself as he tried to piece everything back together.

Everything was wrong, alien, he was confused, angry, upset. Hours blurred into days, days blurred into one week, then two weeks.

The hulking figure of Lavender the Barbarian sat by his bedside. He liked when Lavender came to visit, he understood how Petal felt. Necrosis, despite apparently being a powerful healer, despised violence of any kind, and when Petal had stated he planned to get revenge, she had simply scoffed at him.

“Are you able to stand?” Lavender asked, and Petal nodded. It was a lie, but he wanted to act strong for the hunky barbarian. It was a lie he had told before, every day for the past week he had attempted to stand, before his hooves buckled under him and he was left writhing on the ground like a worm.

This time, he was going to do it. His body moved slowly, sluggishly, but this time it felt like his body, his muscles still burned, but he didn’t care. He had been stuck in bed for weeks, Petal felt an intense need to get out and do anything.

His hooves attempted to take his weight, and pain ripped through his nerve endings. His muscles felt weak, he felt like he was dying all over again. The barbarian stepped up to help him stand, offering one of those tree-trunk hooves to use as a brace.

Pressing into the warmth of his battle hardened form, Petal found his own strength, and his hooves held beneath him with only a few minor screams of agony. But he could stand!

It would have been a prideful moment if the sudden shift in direction after weeks of almost dying caused his stomach to turn, and he suddenly spewed bile out of his mouth and onto the barbarian’s chest.

His throat burned, his eyes were watering, but the barbarian didn’t seem to care in the slightest, using a damp towel that had originally been to fight off Petal’s fever to clean the vomit from off of his chest and the floor.

“Petal is sorry.” Said Petal, trying to focus on not collapsing in a heap, wobbling about on her hooves, “I’ll clean it up.” He offered sheepishly, but at the moment he wasn’t able to walk, let alone clean.

The barbarian just shook his head, “Just focus on standing, I will get something to smite this mess.”